Roman Gange. Gestus absconditus

In Benyamin's notes, several motives sound about Kafka. Benjamin did not have time to ask a topic regarding which these motives would be read as variations. Therefore, we will take only one motive and put it in the context, the choice of which is dictated by the motive itself. This is a gesture motive. Benjamin writes that "all the work of Kafka is a certain set of gestures, the symbolic meaning of which in all their certainty, however, is by no means clear to the author, on the contrary, the author to establish such meaning still strives by testing gestures in different situations and contexts. Theater for such testing is the most suitable place." The gestures of Kafka’s characters “are too excessive for our usual world: they break through the gaps in it, through which completely different spaces are visible. The more Kafka’s skill grew, the more often he completely ceased to adapt this incredible gesture to the everyday life of everyday situations and explain it.” And further: "... the most impenetrable for Kafka was always a gesture. Each gesture for him is ... the drama itself. The scene on which this drama is played is a World Theater, the program for which the sky itself reveals. On the other hand, the sky is only its backdrop; so if you study this theater according to its own laws, you need to pick up the scene in the frame and hang in a picture gallery ... The incomprehensible mystery in combination with a striking and artless simplicity turns ... the gesture is essentially into the animal movement ... But Kafka is always like that; in the human gesture, he takes away the inherited semantic supports, thus acquiring an object of thought in it, which is not the end. " That, perhaps, is all that Benjamin writes about the gesture of Kafka.

What do we know about the gesture? In the era of classicism, the concept of a gesture arose, prevailing to this day. The gesture is considered as an expressive means, a means of mastering internal mental content, whether it is emotion, reaction or meaning. With the help of a gesture, the body can communicate this internal content to another. A whole primitive psychology sets a series of correspondences between feelings and their embodiment in a gesture. Thus, gestures are signs. The classical concept of gesture allows two understanding of its symbolic: a gesture as an index and a gesture as a symbol, if you start from the typology of the pier . The index is a natural sign associated with the presented object as a result with the cause. A symbol is an arbitrary, conventional sign. The first understanding sins with ethnocentrism, the second is deeply knitted in the categories of consciousness and language.

The reaction to the classical concept was the tendency to define plastic not as communication, but as a creation or production. As for dates, we note that this trend arose after the death of Kafka. The gesture from the sign of something internal turns into a signifier, the search for the signified or source for which becomes the main problem. Such theorists of the theater as Meyerhold, Arto and Grotovsky introduce the motive of the hieroglyph or ideograms here. For Meyerhold, any movement is a hieroglyph with his own, special meaning, which should immediately be deciphered. For Arto and Grotovsky, the character is a synonym for not translated into another language of an iconic sign, as if a symbol and a symbolized object at the same time. In the terminology of the pier, the iconic sign is a sign based on similarity to the presented object. Then the hieroglyph is a sign that has lost its object, but in a paradoxically preserved similarity with it. Thus, if the classic body is just an illustration of psychological, intellectual or moral meaning, now the body, which is the soul, forms the material from which the meaning is sculpted.

A special place is occupied by the concept of Bakhtin's topographic gesture. The world is a space, hierarchically organized along the axes of the top and bottom, sky and earth. In this space there are meaningful places, and something (man, act, word, gesture) acquires artistic meaning, only being in one of these places. Any space - at home, the human body - should be inscribed in the topography of the world in order to become the arena of an artistically significant event. Any movement in space, moving a person or hand during gestures, in addition to its real, plot and domestic understanding, always has a certain topographic, hierarchically colored understanding. Every image has a obscure topographic basis, the root of which is not in a dead and forgotten tradition, but in the current topographic scheme of the world, which is real, effective, but is not realized by us. Today the theater is erasing all hints of topographic scene, building a household realistic decoration. At one time, this, like the transformation of verbal topographic images into conditional speech stamps, served as a condition for the occurrence of an expressive psychological individual gesture. If earlier the gesture was perceived, “read” extensively, in relation to the specific and visible topographic limits and the poles of the world, between which he was prostrated , extended, now the gesture is read intensively , in relation to only one point - the most or less deep expression of his individual soul. This point itself, a soul -speaking soul, cannot be localized in general , since there are no axial coordinates for its localization. If a certain final integrity of the world is assumed, then it is mediated by a complex mental process, you won’t show your hand - but this is what made a topographic gesture. The expressive indoor gesture is typical : take something like a trembling hand that opens the cigarette case and takes out cigarettes. It is typical that the combination of household practical meaningfulness with individual internal expressiveness of the gesture, and the latter, like any subjectivity, is revealed precisely in violations, gesture deviations from a normal, practically and technically appropriate path, in its inhibition and errors. This internal intensity of an individual soul seeks new intensive coordinates and limits in this new temporary and spatially relative world.

What can be said about the gesture of Kafka in the interpretation of Benyamin? From the first quote we have taken, it is clear that Kafka’s gesture is not a classic gesture, since it does not have a ready, initially established meaning. Kafka is engaged in verbal production of various gestures, and then, as it were, explores their expressive potential, using them in various contexts. So here we could fully introduce the motive of the hieroglyph or ideogram. But in the aforementioned theater theorists, such a hieroglyphic gesture is “centripetal”: it constantly revolves around the point of bodily presence, describing various trajectories near it, more accurately and more accurately determining it for others. Even being extremely abstract, such a gesture remains purely individual. At Kafka, as we see from the second quote we have taken, such a gesture is endlessly centrifugal, it is directed beyond the limits of the indoor and attic world close to us, it loses its everyday meaning. Maybe he loses it in favor of the meaning of the topographic? Maybe Kafka returns to literature the world of hierarchies, the top and bottom, hell and paradise? Such, inevitably theological today, interpretations of Kafka's creativity exist. But they are most alien to Benjamin. Here is what he writes about the world of Kafka and about the position of “living creatures” in this world: “Not one ... a place assigned to it and a durable shape that is not subject to substitution; not one knows rest - only the everlasting May or fall; not one is given to exchange places with an enemy or a neighbor; there would not be an uninterrupted one, even having exhausted his term, and not a single one, and not a single one, which is already already, which is already already, which is already already, which is already. At the very beginning of its long test, it was impossible to talk about order and hierarchies here. Thus, the gesture unfolds against the background of primitive chaos. From the third quote, which we have taken at the very beginning, it is clear that heaven and earth, hell and paradise are the boundaries of the fake world, the scenery that fall from the most insignificant gesture. This gesture, therefore, overcomes not only expressive, but also topographic significance, pointing out the outer darkness, the area of ​​darkness and cold, where the myriads of creatures are swarmed in the marsh mud and do not find a refuge. On this, in fact, any stories break off, leaving no place for the hope of salvation.